Imagine then a scene--the chief Nature Festival of that forest worship: the New Year's day of the Druids.

A vast concourse of people, men and women and children, are on their way to the forest; they are moving toward an oak tree that has been found with mistletoe growing on it--growing there so seldom. As the excited throng come in sight of it, they hail it with loud cries of reverence and delight. Under it they gather; there a banquet is spread. In the midst of the a.s.semblage one figure towers--the Arch Druid. Every eye is fixed fearfully on him, for on whomsoever his own eye may fall with wrath, he may be doomed to become one of the victims annually sacrificed to the oak.

A gold chain is around his neck; gold bands are around his arms. He is clad in robes of spotless white. He ascends the tree to a low bough, and making a hollow in the folds of his robes, he crops with a golden pruning hook the mistletoe and so catches it as it falls. Then it is blessed and scattered among the throng, and the priest prays that each one so receiving it may receive also the divine favor and blessing of which it is Nature's emblem. Two white bulls, the horns of which have never hitherto been touched, are now adorned with fillets and are slaughtered in sacrifice.

Then at last it is over, the people are gone, the forest is left to itself, and the New Year's ceremony of cutting the mistletoe from the oak is at an end.

Here he ended the story.

She had sat leaning far forward, her fingers interlocked and her brows knitted. When he stopped, she sat up and studied him a moment in bewilderment:

"But why did you call that a dark story?" she asked. "Where is the cruelty? It is beautiful, and I shall never forget it and it will never throw a dark image on my mind: New Year's day--the winter woods--the journeying throng--the oak--the bough--the banquet beneath--the white bulls with fillets on their horns--the white-robed priest--the golden sickle in his hand--the stroke that severs the mistletoe--the prayer that each soul receiving any smallest piece will be blessed in life's sorrows! If I were a great painter, I should like to paint that scene. In the centre should be some young girl, pressing to her heart what she believed to be heaven's covenant with her under the guise of a blossom. How could you have wished to withhold such a story from me?"

He smiled at her a little sadly.

"I have not yet told you all," he said, "but I have told you enough."

Instantly she bent far over toward him with intuitive scrutiny. Under her breath one word escaped:

"Ah!"

It was the breath of a discovery--a discovery of something unknown to her.

"I am sparing you, Josephine!"

She stretched each arm along the back of the sofa and pinioned the wood in her clutch.

"Are you sparing me?" she asked in a tone of torture. "Or are you sparing yourself?"

The heavy staff on which he stood leaning dropped from his relaxed grasp to the floor. He looked down at it a moment and then calmly picked it up.

"I am going to tell you the story," he said with a new quietness.

She was aroused by some change in him.

"I will not listen! I do not wish to hear it!"

"You will have to listen," he said. "It is better for you to know. Better for any human being to know any truth than suffer the bane of wrong thinking. When you are free to judge, it will be impossible for you to misjudge."

"I have not misjudged you! I have not judged you! In some way that I do not understand you are judging yourself!"

He stepped back a pace--farther away from her--and he drew himself up. In the movement there was instinctive resentment. And the right not to be pried into--not even by the nearest.

The step which had removed him farther from her had brought him nearer to the Christmas Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough being thus pressed against was forced upward and reappeared on one of his shoulders. The movement seemed human: it was like the conscious hand of the tree. The fir, standing there decked out in the artificial tawdriness of a double-dealing race, laid its wild sincere touch on him--as sincere as the touch of dying human fingers--and let its pa.s.sing youth flow into him. It attracted his attention, and he turned his head toward it as with recognition. Other boughs near the floor likewise thrust themselves forward, hiding his feet so that he stood ankle-deep in forestry.

This reunion did not escape her. Her overwrought imagination made of it a sinister omen: the bough on his shoulder rested there as the old forest claim; the boughs about his feet were the ancestral forest tether. As he had stepped backward from her, Nature had a.s.serted the earlier right to him. In strange sickness and desolation of heart she waited.

He stood facing her but looking past her at centuries long gone; the first sound of his voice registered upon her ear some message of doom:

"Listen, Josephine!"

She buried her face in her hands.

"I cannot! I will not!"

"You will have to listen. You know that for some years, apart from my other work, I have been gathering together the woodland customs of our people and trying to trace them back to their origin and first meaning. In our age of the world we come upon many playful forest survivals of what were once grave things. Often in our play and pastimes and lingering superst.i.tions about the forest we cross faint traces of what were once vital realities.

"Among these there has always been one that until recently I have never understood. Among country people oftenest, but heard of everywhere, is the saying that if a girl is caught standing under the mistletoe, she may be kissed by the man who thus finds her. I have always thought that this ceremony and playful sacrifice led back to some ancient rite--I could not discover what. Now I know."

In a voice full of a new delicacy and scarcely audible, he told her.

It is another scene in the forest of Britain. This time it is not the first day of the year--the New Year's day of the Druids when they celebrated the national festival of the oak. But it is early summer, perhaps the middle of May--May in England--with the young beauty of the woods. It is some hushed evening at twilight. The new moon is just silvering the tender leaves and creating a faint shadow under the trees. The hawthorn is in bloom--red and white--and not far from the spot, hidden in some fragrant tuft of this, a nightingale is singing, singing, singing.

Lifting itself above the smaller growths stands the young manhood of the woods--a splendid oak past its thirtieth year, representing its youth and its prime conjoined. In its trunk is the summer heat of the all-day sun. Around its roots is velvet turf, and there are wild violet beds. Its huge arms are stretched toward the ground as though reaching for some object they would clasp; and on one of these arms as its badge of divine authority, worn there as a knight might wear the colors of his Sovereign, grows the mistletoe. There he stands--the Forest Lover.

The woods wait, the shadows deepen, the hush is more intense, the moon's rays begin to be golden, the song of the nightingale grows more pa.s.sionate, the beds of moss and violets wait.

Then the shrubbery is tremblingly parted at some place and upon the scene a young girl enters--her hair hanging down--her limbs most lightly clad--the flush of red hawthorn on the white hawthorn of her skin--in her eyes love's great need and mystery. Step by step she comes forward, her fingers trailing against whatsoever budding wayside thing may stay her strength. She draws nearer to the oak, searching amid its boughs for that emblem which she so dreads to find and yet more dreads not to find: the emblem of a woman's fruitfulness which the young oak--the Forest Lover--reaches down toward her. Finding it, beneath it with one deep breath of surrender she takes her place--the virgin's tryst with the tree--there to be tested.

Such is the command of the Arch Druid: it is obedience--submission to that test--or death for her as a sacrifice to the oak which she has rejected.

Again the shrubbery is parted, rudely pushed aside, and a man enters--a tried and seasoned man--a human oak--counterpart of the Forest Lover--to officiate at the test.

He was standing there in the parlor of his house and in the presence of his wife. But in fealty he was gone: he was in the summer woods of ancestral wandering, the fatherland of Old Desire.

_He_ was the man treading down the shrubbery; it was _his_ feet that started toward the oak; _his_ eye that searched for the figure half fainting under the bough; for _him_ the bed of moss and violets--the hair falling over the eyes--the loosened girdle--the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of hawthorn white and pink--the listening song of the nightingale--the silence of the summer woods--the seclusion--the full surrender of the two under that bough of the divine command, to escape the penalty of their own death.

The blaze of uncontrollable desire was all over him; the fire of his own story had treacherously licked him like a wind-bent flame. The light that she had not seen in his eyes for so long rose in them--the old, unfathomable, infolding tenderness. A quiver ran around his tense nostrils.

And now one little phrase which he had uttered so sacredly years before and had long since forgotten rose a second time to his lips--tossed there by a second tide of feeling. On the silence of the room fell his words:

"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"

The storm that had broken over him died away. He shut his eyes on the vanishing scene: he opened them upon her.

He had told her the truth about the story; he may have been aware or he may not have been aware that he had revealed to her the truth about himself.

"This is what I would have kept from you, Josephine," he said quietly.

She was sitting there before him--the mother of his children, of the sleeping ones, of the buried ones--the b.u.t.terfly broken on the wheel of years: l.u.s.treless and useless now in its summer.

She sat there with the whiteness of death.